The specification relates to providing situational understanding of unknown roadway conditions that are ahead for a connected vehicle.
A vehicle traveling down a roadway is not capable of observing all the roadway conditions that are ahead of them on the roadway. For example, a roadway condition may include one or more of the following events: a traffic jam; a traffic accident; an available car pool lane; roadway construction; etc.
The driver may not be able to view all these events. For example, the events may be located many miles away or behind a curve in the roadway, a hill or some other obstruction which occludes the event from the driver's vision. The sensors of the vehicle may not be able to detect these events either. For example, the event may be outside of the range of the sensors of the vehicle, and so, the vehicle may not be able to inform the driver of these events. Accordingly, drivers are unaware of some of the roadway conditions that are ahead of them for these example reasons. Such roadway conditions may be described as “unknown roadway conditions” because neither the driver nor the driver's vehicle are aware of their existence.